


Immurement

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 05:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vignette.  The Doctor reflects on a past acquaintance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Immurement

He’d gone back with purpose, then events transpired and led him by the hand, as they tended to do, and he’d nearly forgotten it.  April 22, 1948, a little past dusk, the end of Mandatory Palestine, the beginning of British evacuation.  He’d been swept into action to the percussive rattle of gunfire, caught up in the exodus, a moving river of humanity carving through the crumbling stone and the stinging grit of blowing sand in the scarlet light of the setting sun.  And all the while, perhaps inexplicably, he’d been thinking of what the old man had once said up in orbit far above Earth, looking down at the dawn over the edge of the world turning cloud banks and bodies of water chrome-bright like magma and mercury.

_“D’you think he changed them too?  In their graves?”_

He never did know.  The would-be Immortality Gate worked on large-scale medical templates, most likely fashioned to respond to bioelectric heat signatures, RNA patterns, chromosomatic syncopation, organic particle vibrations.  It was a long shot to think it would affect dead tissue, could modify the inanimate, and surely there was no justifiable reasoning why it would.  But he’d never put it past its hired programmer to go beyond practical reasoning to grind his metaphorical heel into his imagined victory in a way only  _he_  would ever know.  To leave his fingerprints irrevocably in the buried history of an entire people, like workers who build houses and leave things in the walls.  Newspapers, bottles of wine.  Long before the creation of human decency, they’d wall up cats behind the mortar for luck.  Living people were immured inside walls like insects in amber to give a building a soul.  It sounds like something The Master would do—lay waste to sanctified integrity for his own pitch black delight.  

Even afterward, no, he never did know. There were ways, maybe, he could have found out, long after it would no longer matter to anyone but himself.

And really, he doesn’t want to know if there is nothing he can do to set it right.

Out there somewhere, in all this, this battle or one like it, days before or days afterward: a scared skinny boy calling himself Private Mott, who never will have killed a man until he’s old and gray and even then, he won’t pull the trigger.  He can’t feel regret for any of it, for in this time they are strangers, and were he to encounter the green Private, they would have little reason to speak and even less to say.  The young Mott would have no knowledge of a wife, his daughter Sylvia, his granddaughter that would save the world on a far grander scale than the fight he is watching tonight, but all the same with a mirror image of the noble intent behind it. 

Because humanity is defined by its flaws, its greed, its sense of self and sense of sacrifice.  What it chooses to do with the perceived freedom it has in its own fate.  That something so easily wounded, with bodies and veins and bones so fragile chooses to throw itself into battle for the good of a whole is something he cannot fathom.  The Time Lords could go to war for millennia, fighting in a void and ultimately losing only a few bodies the way a man might dispose of an old jacket and with the same amount of regretful attachment.  

He won’t seek him out.  He’d merely wanted to be here, to have laid his foot in the soil in the place Wilfred Mott had looked out over the smoke and bullets at the world gone mad and never fired a shot that ended a life.  

It’s more than he can say for himself anymore.  It’s a dramatic threat, but demons don’t run when a good man goes to war.  And it’s been a long time since he’s thought of himself as a good man.

Even now, so much time later, so many more years than Wilf could live in a row—he will never not mean it: he is proud.  Like a role model, a touchstone, like a father that he would be immeasurably proud to call his own but cannot.  Somewhere in the echoing labyrinthine cellar of his metaphorical heart, Wilfred Mott is immured in the Doctor like a man in a wall, gifting him with a soul when he isn’t certain he has one or believes they exist at all. 


End file.
